Metal
Trust No One Recordings · 25 September 2026
“Staining the Ether” runs eighteen minutes and fifty-one seconds and spends its opening stretch without drums: clean guitars, no resolution, and a tension left to build until it gets uncomfortable. When the kit finally lands, the guitar is already saturated behind it, and the track sits in that thickness for a good while before David Johansson’s first roar arrives. To trail it in June the band had to cut a ten-minute edit.
It’s Kongh’s fourth album and it comes thirteen years after Sole Creation (2013). The track count tells you on its own where the band has gone: five on Counting Heartbeats (2007), five on Shadows of the Shapeless (2009), four on Sole Creation and three here, thirty-nine minutes split eighteen, seven and thirteen.
Kongh is mostly Johansson, from Småland. He sings and plays guitar, bass and electronics, and he also writes, produces, mixes and draws the cover. Christian Augustin is on drums and Jörgen Sandström on backing vocals. The sessions ran from November 2025 to May 2026 in Stockholm, with the drums tracked and mixed separately by Kristian Karlsson in Söderköping and mastering by Magnus Lindberg.
“Guided to the End” is seven minutes and the one place on the record where the drums take the lead: it comes straight in on a chiselled riff and a kick pattern closer to glam than to doom, and it ends on a frankly psychedelic guitar solo. The voice works two registers, the usual growl and a high rasp Johansson hasn’t leaned on this much before.
The title track, thirteen minutes and change, goes back to the long form: thick bass, guitars moving at the pace of lava, a clean and quiet vocal in the middle and the growl swallowing it soon after. It ends repeating the line that names it until the words turn into a chant.
Two of the three tracks are built to the same plan: long opening, collapse, second climb, closing mantra. On an eight-song record it would pass unnoticed; on a three-song one the design is in plain view, and the seven minutes in the middle are the only change of shape in three quarters of an hour.
Trust No One Recordings puts it out on a six-panel digipak and two vinyl runs of a hundred and fifty copies each. Kongh had toured with Meshuggah and with YOB before the thirteen years of silence.
Rating: 8/10
Text by Roger Estivill